The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [142]
Fortunately, this is starting to happen. At the time of writing this book, nineteen U.S. states (California, Maine, Maryland, Washington, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia, Missouri, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, in chronological order by adoption date)—and New York City—have passed legislation requiring e-waste recycling. Even better, all of these laws except the one in California use a producer responsibility approach, meaning the companies that made the computers pay for the recycling.73 This is a great incentive for the producers to think hard about ways to eliminate toxics and design for repair and recycling, since they have to bear the cost of dealing with the Stuff eventually. If you live in any other U.S. state, contact the Electronics TakeBack Coalition to learn how to get e-waste recycling laws in your state.
Another positive development is the expansion of the e-Stewards program, a third-party certification program that checks out electronics recyclers and certifies those that meet strict environmental and social justice standards. Facilities certified as e-Stewards commit to recycling e-waste (using a process similar to the one I witnessed at the Roseville facility) at sites here in the United States and do not send any toxic e-waste to landfills, incinerators, prisons, or developing countries.74 Find an e-Steward certified responsible recycler near you at www.e-stewards.org.
The Away Myth
So here are all these huge piles of waste from various sources. Where does it all go? You probably already know this, but if not, here’s the big revelation: for the great majority of these billions of tons of Stuff, there is no “away.” Period. We do one of two things with most of our waste: we bury it, or we burn it. Yes, some of it gets recycled, which is as close to “away” as it gets—I’ll talk about that later on. But there’s another important aspect of “away”: too often, because we don’t want to deal with the hassle and the pollution associated with the bury or burn methods (or for that matter, the recycling) here in the United States, boatloads of our American waste are sent to other regions of the world, often under the guise of being recycled there. Not only is it unethical and immoral to dump our often toxics-contaminated wastes on other communities—it turns out we can’t escape the health and environmental consequences anyway, which drift back to us via the air, the water, and the bodies of the creatures we eat.
Away by Burial
In the most common scenario for disposal—for 64.5 percent of municipal solid waste in the United States,75 we dig a big hole in the ground and fill it up with garbage. This is commonly known as a dump, but since open-air dumps developed an image problem (and a rodent problem), some engineers figured out that they could upgrade the hole with a liner and systems to collect the liquid runoff (leachate) and then call it a “sanitary landfill.” That term always reminds me of what green-collar jobs advocate Van Jones says about so-called clean coal: “It represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, not in the actual technology.”76 “Sanitary landfill” sounds much better than “dump,” but they are still just holes in the